Cobol – COmmon Business Oriented Language – is one of my favorite languages and the one I’m absolutely most impressed with. It is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in active use. At this time it’s 50 years since Grace Hopper created Cobol and the first compilers was subsequently implemented during the year 1960. At December 6th and 7th 1960 essentially the same Cobol program was run on two different make of computers, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer.

Here’s some facts that you most likely didn’t know about Cobol:

1. According to a survey done in Great Britain and USA people are in contact with Cobol around 10 to 13 time every day.

2. Of 310 billion line of software that are in use today over 200 billion lines are Cobol, that’s about 65% of the total software.

3. Every day 5 billion lines of new Cobol code are produced.

4. 80% of all daily business transactions are processed in Cobol.

5. 70% of all mission-critical applications are written in Cobol.

6. 2 trillion dollars is the total investment in Cobol systems.

And of couse the famous Hello World for everyone that doesn’t know what Cobol looks like:

      IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
      MAIN.
          DISPLAY 'Hello, world.'.
          STOP RUN.

Since it’s a new year and everything I find it natural that I do something noone would ever believe I would do, so I went off and installed VMware ESXi on one of my servers, created myself a virtual server and installed Microsoft Windows 2008 trail version. My goal is to setup a fully functional Active Directory Domain without any prior experience in Microsoft Active Directory. Active Directory is one of few thing I’m really curious about when it comes to Microsoft products, it’s so integrated in the system with single sign-on in difference to UNIX/Linux that I’m used to.

My first experience was that everything was very easy to install and all information I needed to configure the basics were provided in the configuration dialog. Everything went really smooth and easy until I had installed the Active Directory Service and Windows asked me to reboot. I did reboot and afterwards my Administrator password didn’t work, only solution: re-install…

After a nights sleep I’m back in the game with a new installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2008. I’m doing pretty much the same thing as yesterday with the difference that I’m not deadly tired this time. After the installation and configuration of Active Directory is done I restart my server and to my surprise everything works and after solving a minor DNS-issue my virtualized Microsoft Windows XP is now a part of the Active Directory Domain.

Microsoft Active Directory is easy to use and so simple to install that it could be done even for the smallest office that needs to centralize documents and/or programs. Why Linux/UNIX is so far behind when it comes to these kind of feature is a question and I believe it’s important that open source community do something about this in order to get Linux onto the desktops in offices world-wide.

It was barely a year since I said it last time: We still have a lot to learn from Microsoft and it’s not all about marketing.